Classic Christmas Stories (17 page)

Christmas has gone long ago. Already we have heard ominous groaning
of the heavy ice along the land-wash, warning us that the open sea is getting
nearer, and that soon our icy fetters will be broken. The toys and trinkets
from the poor spruce tree have already lost most of their pleasure-giving
power. Must it not always be so, at last, with the things we are apt to call
“valuables.”

Clem has gone to his home again. He is able to run and walk like the
merry lad he is. For not only his life, but his limb also, has been saved to him.
And we have learnt once more that the real joy of Christmas comes of those
small opportunities for giving to others—faint efforts to re-echo, however
faintly, the love this feast commemorates. There is no cant in saying, “It is
more blessed to give than to receive.”

by Hans Rollmann

T
HE TEMPERATURE HAS FALLEN to thirty-six below and the
wind howls along the palisades, yet inside the sturdy wooden
building fourteen Moravians thank their Lord for the warmth of
Christmas. The little band—six Germans, four Danes, and four Britons,
including three women—is celebrating its first Christmas Eve at Nain,
having arrived in the bay in August of 1771. In haste they built their mission house. One Inuit, Manuina, settled near the Europeans with his two
wives and three children, but the family is presently in Aupaluktuk with
his brother-in-law in search of whales.

Alternating between German and English, the Moravians sing
familiar Christmas hymns, but also remember Christ’s crucifixion,
the two focal points of their piety. Jens Haven, the Danish carpenter,
sings with fervour. Once a missionary in Greenland, he has kept alive
the idea of a Labrador mission after a first effort in 1752 by Johann
Christian Erhardt failed. Now he has become the driving force behind
the settlement in Nain after three previous explorations. Next to him
stands his wife, Mary Butterworth, a good-natured Yorkshire woman
who joined the Moravians at Fulneck. She married “little Jens, ” as he is
affectionately known among the Inuit, in May, only a month before their
departure for Labrador. Tonight, the Christmas story with the child in
the manger resonates with a special meaning for this Mary in Labrador.
While she sings, she feels the movement of her first child within her.
John Benjamin will be born in February, 1772, and will later follow in his
parents’ footsteps as a missionary.

Superintendent Christoph Brasen, a Danish barber surgeon married
to an Alsatian wife, records this first Christmas Eve service in the Nain
diary. “We offered Him our poor and sinful hearts including life and soul, ”
he writes, “to serve him willingly and stand at his command, whatever
he wants to use us for in this rough and cold land.” He only regrets that
Manuina and his family cannot be with them. He knows that song and
celebration are much more effective in communicating the Moravian
religious message than their theology or doctrine. He also knows that
Manuina loves to sing about the Christ child.

While they now sing in unison with their brothers and sisters, in three
years’ time the superintendent and Gottfried Lehmann, a weaver from
Saxony, will no longer be with their brethren. The two will perish when
their sloop founders north of Nain on an exploration journey to establish
a northern missionary outpost, the future Okak. Okak in turn will be
devastated by the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918 and disappear as
a community. Only the rhubarb is still a silent witness to the Moravian
presence.

On Christmas Day, Larsen Drachardt preaches a sermon about
the little child in the manger who was also God. In the sermon, the
sixty-year-old theologian revisits his childhood days in Denmark and
reflects perhaps about his later life as a journey in grace, especially the
Lutheran missionary service in Greenland that changed his life forever.
In Greenland, Drachardt learned the language of the Inuit during his
twelve-year stay and eventually became a Moravian. After a mystical
experience of Christ’s presence in Greenland, he later joined Jens Haven
on two of his exploratory journeys to Labrador. In 1765, he interpreted
for Governor Palliser at Chateau Bay, becoming a bridge between the
Europeans and Inuit.

The third day of Christmas is celebrated with joy and solemnity. The
temperature has now fallen to forty degrees below zero. At dusk when
the Europeans sit together, reminiscing and reading, they are suddenly
startled by a loud scream from outside. The dogs start barking furiously.
When they run to see what has disrupted the quiet of their holiday evening,
they discover Manuina, their Inuit neighbour. Fearing the dogs that run in
front of the palisades, he wields a large knife. He is alone, but his wives are
not far behind. He has merely run ahead of them to arrive before it is too
dark to be recognized outside. An hour later, the two women follow. Since
it is so cold and the family has not lived in their dwelling near the station
for some time, the Moravians prepare them sleeping quarters in the little
hall of the mission building. The Inuit also take part in the missionaries’
evening service as well as in their morning blessing of 28 December. A
deep bond unites European and Inuit during this first Christmas season.
“We all feel a special love for the man and his family, ” Brasen writes in the
communal diary, “and they definitely also trust us.”

The Okak Moravians celebrate their first Christmas Eve in 1776 with
a so-called love feast, a simple shared meal amidst singing and prayers,
restoring an early Christian practice adopted also by the Methodists, who
celebrate love feasts in the 1770s in Conception Bay. Jens Haven, who is
part of the first Christmas at Okak, writes in the diary that they keep a
night watch and “pray to the child in the manger in front of his creche.”
Similar religious celebrations continue the next day, Christmas.

The Okak diary records the mixed feelings of solidarity and isolation
of those labouring in such a remote location. The nearby Inuit visitors
are also told the good news of Christmas, a message to be repeated the
following days at nearby Uvibak and Kivertlok by Haven and Johann
Ludwig Beck, a missionary with Greenland experience who joined the
Moravians in Labrador in 1773.

Hopedale celebrates its first Christmas in 1782. At this station south of
Nain, the children are the centre of the Christmas Eve festivities. Thirty-three of them meet and are read the story of Jesus’ birth. Each child is
given some bread as a gift. Afterwards they are also shown a nativity scene
and a representation of the crucifixion. The children and mothers are
particularly drawn to these artistic images. Later, the Europeans celebrate
a love feast and pray in front of the nativity scene and—according to
Haven, their chronicler—welcome the dear child and ask him to come
into their midst and remain with them. Christmas Day is spent in praise
of the incarnation and with thanks that Jesus has come as their brother.

On 26 December, the good news story of Christmas is recounted to
the Inuit, but here the diary reveals the difficulties of the entire missionary
enterprise. The drama in the encounter of the two cultures—European
and Aboriginal—can still be sensed in the casual remark of Jens Haven,
who feels that communicating the message of the saviour’s birth “is not
as easy to make clear as one would wish.”

Today Moravians retain their distinctive Christmas celebrations and
remain a mission-oriented church, although Labrador Moravians are now
administratively on their own. Today Moravians also think of missions
somewhat differently, emphasizing the need to change society not from
without but from within. In the words of a Moravian from Africa during
a recent conference on missions: “The example of the Apostle Paul who
became ‘to the Jews a Jew and to the Greeks a Greek, ’ deserves repeating
more now than ever before.”

by Hans Rollmann

O
N CHRISTMAS DAY OF 1866 Thomas Merrifield was
fighting for his life.

Already up to his knees in what the settlers called “slob”
and the Inuit “sikuak, ” he continued to sink. The events of his forty-four
years ran in rapid succession before his eyes: his youth and upbringing
in Devon and, thereafter, his hard life on the north coast of Labrador.
Elizabeth, his wife, had come to share with him the privations and simple
joys of a settler in the bay.

She and their daughter, Harriet Elizabeth, had gone ahead of him
by sled to Zoar, the new spiritual and social centre for Inuit and settlers
living between Nain and Hopedale. Not even these loved ones could
hear his anguish. Thomas Merrifield was all by himself. The man after
whom a bay and a mountain would be named was only a solitary speck
on snowshoes, sinking in a partially frozen Tasiuyak Bay.

Or was there somebody, after all, who had listened to Merrifield’s
anguished prayer? For just as he was about to resign himself to his fate—
perhaps thinking for a moment that he should have accepted the invitation
of his former drinking companions to join them for a party instead of
spending Christmas with the Moravians at Zoar—just then he felt something
firm under his feet. His snowshoes caught and were able to sustain him, and
with one more effort he reached the safety of more compact snow.

Later that day, he saw the lights of the mission house. Exhausted,
frozen, yet glad of his salvation on a partially frozen bay, Merrifield
stumbled into the house, where an anxious wife and daughter were
waiting for him.

This true story happened in 1866 to the man after whom Merrifield
Bay near Davis Inlet is named. The Moravians, a mission-minded
Protestant Church, after establishing themselves on Labrador’s north
coast in Nain (1771), Okak (1776), Hopedale (1782), and Hebron (1830),
had answered a call to accommodate Inuit and settlers living between
Nain and Hopedale. Named after the biblical village of Zoar ( “Little”),
into which Lot and his family fled for refuge when Sodom and Gomorrah
were being destroyed (Genesis 19), the mission station was planned for
spiritual and economic reasons: spiritual, to share and sustain the faith
of Inuit and settlers living between Nain and Hopedale; and economic,
to encourage Inuit and settlers to trade their fish and pelts with the
Moravians instead of with Hunt & Henley or the Hudson’s Bay Company,
fierce competitors of the Moravian trade, or even with the Newfoundland
schooners now showing up annually on the coast.

Eventually, economic reasons closed the store when the indebtedness
of those trading with the missionaries at Zoar had reached unmanageable
amounts and their numbers decreased. The original building of this
extension of Nain and Hopedale, nestled in a picturesque bay, was
constructed in 1865. In the following year, Friedrich Elsner and family as
well as a single Danish brother, Peder Dam, moved into the new premises.
Inuit eventually settled nearby, but the congregation remained small.
They erected a log house and a somewhat larger building complex that
served as store and church, and—as in all other Moravian settlements
except Killinek—planted an elaborate garden.

In the winter of their first year at Zoar, the Moravians also started
a school for children, as they had done in other places, since education
and schools ranked closely after worship and missions in their value
system. A trained Inuit schoolteacher, Thomas, who had accompanied
the missionaries from Nain, served as instructor.

The missionaries were, however, surprised and gratified by the great
responsiveness and support of the settler families living in the area, who
considered the new station their home.

Next to the Inuit schoolteacher, Thomas, and the new chapel servant,
Nathan, two settler families stood out in the congregation. Amos
Voisey, who had once worked for a Moravian competitor, had joined
the congregation at Zoar with his extended family, while the Merrifield
family, living at Merrifield Bay, also came to consider it their spiritual
home. Especially in those two families the missionaries saw the Spirit
moving.

The English settler Amos Voisey of Voisey’s Bay fame, originally a
member of the church in Hopedale, sought spiritual counsel from the
Zoar missionaries and later also entered into a business relationship with
them, as did his son George, who was a member of the congregation.

One evening, the spiritually troubled Amos had unburdened himself
to missionary Peder Dam, asking him earnestly whether his sins could be
forgiven. Dam answered that the resurrection of Jesus was witness that all
sins had been borne by Christ, even those of Amos Voisey. For Voisey, a
religious backslider, these words initiated a spiritual breakthrough.

“Waking as from a dream, ” Dam wrote of this encounter, Voisey
“exclaimed, with tears in his eyes, half-loud: ‘This is it! This is it! I
was missing the resurrected Christ.’ Upon that he went home, and I
recommended him to the faithful care of the Holy Spirit. Now he goes
gladly about his way and is a friendly, very relaxed and happy man.”

Changed lives in the Merrifield family also encouraged the
missionaries at Zoar. Thomas’s wife, Elizabeth, became the first convert
of the Zoar church. The daughter of James Lane and an Inuit woman by
the name of Clara, Elizabeth lived a life without religious commitment
until she met the Moravians at Zoar and became the first person baptized
at the new station. Later, her adult daughter, Harriet, and her husband
would follow her into membership.

Also at Zoar, the last unconverted Inuit south of Nain, Itorsoak, the
forty-three-year-old son of Pualo, was baptized in 1868 and received the
Christian name of Jeremias. As the congregation, swollen to seventy-four
people, crowded into the Zoar mission house on that Christmas Day in
1866, the missionaries tell us of an especially great religious intimacy and
fellowship that was experienced by the assembled congregation.

“We felt, ” the diarist of Zoar writes, “so real the blessing of His birth
in the stable. Our visitors seemed to feel the same. Brother Merrifield
said: ‘How delectable is such a celebration of the birth of our saviour! It is
the first time in my life that I celebrate it in such a way. And I hope I will
never return to my old ways.’”

The weather worsened that Christmas Day so that all visitors had
to remain at Zoar for longer than they had planned. But there were no
complaints, as each enjoyed the company of the others and their Christian
fellowship.